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Re: Asian Americans and Affirmative Action (Score: 1)
by davidals on Monday, September 12 @ 00:13:58 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | Yes - true for Caribbean immigrants and Africans. As a product of the African-American community, I will state that there ARE major, major issues that we need to deal with in our own community - I have personally witnessed and spent time in communities where the sense of fatalism and defeat was absolute.
This is the product of a very, very tragic history, and to see that trun into a self-fulfilling recipe for defeat infuriates me. A friend of mine teaches in an inner-city neighborhood in Little Rock, AR, and he devotes a good deal of effort into working with kids from broken homes, drug-addicted parents, and crime-ridden neighborhoods. I asked him if he's mentioned higher education to the kids, and specifically things like medicine, engineering, technology, sciences; and his response (with a shrug) was that it was not anywhere close to their radar. At a fairly early age, he's dealing with kids who feel (as do their parents) that there is NO HOPE of escaping the garbage of their current existances - that no matter what they do, it will be obliterated by the 'system.' The fear of failure becomes a recipe for not making an attempt; and those who do attempt are often subject to ridicule. There is a collective unconscious present in segments of the African-American community that is so absolutely convinced that we are being conspired against (with plenty of historical justification), that any open doors anywhere are viewed with extreme suspicion - "What's the catch?"
This is cultural suicide, and African-American leaders - at this point in time - are too wrapped up in their own melodramas to really get in the trenches and fix this sorry state of affairs. We've been coasting on a formidable and enviable cultural legacy for quite some time, but let's face it - athletes and hip-hop artists are a dime a dozen at this point in time, and if we really expect to survive in this society, we'd best start lionizing African-American physicists with the same vigor. And that cultural legacy in some ways does betray what has befallen us - African-American intellectual history (like the Harlem renaissance, post-WW2 literary advances and the Civil Rights movement, in particular the intellectual and philosohphical sources and inspirations behind that movement) get comparatively little play in today's media-and-historical landscape.
I've seen how standards in Asian-American (and other immigrant communities, including African and Caribbean communities) have soared, and watched it with great envy, and an overpowering sense that - if we look outside of our community - that is exactly where we need to look.
Politically I lean to the left on most issues, but I'm an educational absolutist in many ways - standards need to be high, to a point of agony, and the time to tolerate excuses is long over. The racism that is built into the system must be dismantled, which is why I can't completely turn my back on affirmative action. But reform is definitely in order, and we - African-Americans, that is - need to have the balls to feed our own to the fire when they sell our youth short. That includes educators, administrators, parents, the African-American church (which is asleep at the wheel on this issue, as they also are on HIV and any number of other issues) or anyone else.
Doing otherwise simply plays into the hands of those (and they do still exist, in great numbers) who WOULD still persist in attempts to 'keep us down.' It's plainly obvious - from other events - that poor people, and black people - aren't often cared about at a widespread level in our society, and expecting empathy to kick in, at this late date, is the epitome of an unrealistic worldview. Expecting system adjustments, legislative action, formulas and empathy towards injustice to do all of the work (that we should, at least in part) be doing is silly. There is no superman, or savior that's going to pull us out of the mess we're in. We do it ourselves (and look to the aforementioned examples), or we
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